How Communication Works

In this video, I discuss profanity: when you can use it, when you can't, and what the consequences are if you use it inappropriately.

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Vsauce on profanity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7dQh8u4Hc

In this video, I recommend books about communication that would make great gifts for yourself or a friend.

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Here are links to the five recommended books.

1.Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss, http://a.co/d/iyTYW5D

2. If I Understood You, by Alan Alda (http://a.co/d/009aCzy)

3. Crucial Conversations, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Rion McMillan, and Al Switzler (http://a.co/d/9K7FLj1).

4. Difficult Conversations, by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen ( http://a.co/d/5t7lWjD)

5. Humble Inquiry, by Edgar Schein (http://a.co/d/hxfzcfR)

This video describes how prior success among team members predicts future success in competitive sports and games. It sheds light on the relative importance of individual talent and the ability to work collaboratively as teammates.

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Link to the paper:https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/uzzi/htm/papers/Prior-Team-Skill-NHB-2018.pdf

This video teaches you 5 phrases that you can use when engaged in active or reflective listening.

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Keywords: how to listen, reflective listening, active listening, listening skills, how to be a great listener

This video teaches you 10 proven ways to recover from embarrassment.

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In this video, I teach you how to be seen as someone who is safe and comfortable to interact with.

This video explains what not to say to comfort a friend.

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Have you ever tried to be emotionally supportive to a friend and instead made things worse? I know I have. It's easy to say the wrong thing when we are trying to help people handle painful emotions.

Here I give you a guide to the potential landmines that you need to avoid.

This video teaches you simple techniques for how to comfort a friend who is hurting. It provides, specific, evidence-based advice about what to say to provide effective emotional support. If you want to know how to comfort someone, but you don't know exactly how, this video is for you.

Much of this advice comes from a paper written by the late Brant Burleson, who for may years was a professor of communication studies at Purdue University.

In this video I conduct an interview with a practicing obstetrician/gynecologist. We discuss the idea of empathy in healthcare and the specific challenges she has faced in trying to lead an empathy education program in her hospital and health system.

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This video gives you 5 basic tips for leading phone conferences that do not bore people to tears. Join me for more content like this at https://howcommunicationworks.com.

The techniques I describe are simple to implement and will teach you how to lead a conference call that people enjoying attending. These tips make conference calls feel cordial, professional, and worthwhile. Your colleagues will actually look forward to being on your calls and will be eager and enthusiastic to team up with you.

You will be more enthusiastic and get more done, and work will actually be more meaningful and rewarding.

I describe the components of an attitude according to the Theory of Reasoned Action: belief strength and outcome evaluation. I also discuss the salience of a belief to an attitude.

There is a tremendous amount of social science research on the psychology of persuasion. If you want to know how to influence people, you need to know the basic communication theory around persuasion and attitude change.

Dan O'Keefe's persuasion textbook: https://amzn.to/2K329XP
Dan O'Keefe's Coursera Course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/leadership-socialinfluence

What is the definition of persuasion according to the most up-to-date social science?

To learn more about communication, go to https://howcommunicationworks.com.

In this video I use the definition of persuasion from Daniel O'Keefe's authoritative textbook. I define the concept of attitude. If you want to know how to persuade people, these are fundamental concepts in psychology.

Get the book: https://amzn.to/2K329XP
Dan O'Keefe's Coursera Course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/leadership-socialinfluence

Improve Your Communication Skills Today: One Critical Step

In this video I describe three different communication styles. Understanding these differences in how people think about the fundamental purpose of language and communication can help you come to grips with certain kinds of misunderstandings.

In the video I describe the idea of a message design logic. A message design logic is an overall way of thinking about how language and communication work, about how to do things with words.

These logics, or styles of communication, are what help us reason from our goals in a conversation to the verbal means for achieving those goals.

There are three different logics of message design: expressive, conventional, and rhetorical.

I described them at greater length in a blog post:
https://www.howcommunicationworks.com/blog/2018/1/19/how-to-talk-to-a-coworker

Understanding these differences can help you in your relationships, because you can begin to understand that what seems inappropriate to you may not be the result of another person being inconsiderate or mean but merely the result of them having a different idea about how communication works.

Here I discuss whether communicating indirectly, by implication rather than by literal statement, is dishonest. When we hint at what we mean rather than saying it outright, are we being deceptive?

In this video I discuss how to make a request indirectly, by asking about the listener's (the requestee's) ability to do the requested act, their willingness to do the act, your desire to have the act done, etc. I give several examples of everyday requests made indirectly.

Indirectness can be used to make a request politely or to make it in such a way that the intention is deniable (because you didn't make the request "on the record."

Politeness is a critical communication skill, and indirectness is a core element of politeness.

I also touch on several other key topics in communication theory, including the cooperative principle, Gricean maxims and Brown and Levinson's politeness theory.

In this video I discuss author and hedge-fund billionaire Ray Dalio's book, Principles, and his ideas about "radical honesty."

Here's a link to the book on Amazon. https://amzn.to/2H5GZd9

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These blog entries are about politeness, which is the opposite of Dalio's "radical honesty":

https://www.howcommunicationworks.com/blog/2017/3/21/how-to-be-polite

https://www.howcommunicationworks.com/blog/2017/3/24/how-to-be-polite-part-2

https://www.howcommunicationworks.com/blog/2017/3/31/what-politeness-says-about-our-relationships

Keywords: tact, politeness, honesty, diplomacy, Ray Dalio, principles, communication skill

The main cause of social anxiety and stress is the fear of being humiliated, of losing face. This is a legitimate fear. Social interaction is risky. There's always a chance we will make fools of ourselves or someone else will make a fool of us. In this video I talk about losing face and saving face, and I describe one fact about the social world that should put us all at ease.

To learn more, visit https://howcommunicationworks.com.

The social world is a stage, and we are all performers. In every interaction, we are engaged in a performance. The point of the performance is to get social support and validation for one of our many role identities. Keeping this in mind will help you make sense of your own and other people's behavior.

This video begins to introduce the basic sociological concepts of impression management, presentation of self, and symbolic interactionism. All of these ideas are fundamental to understanding the theories of the famous sociologist Erving Goffman.

This is the first video from Bruce Lambert of http://www.howcommunicationworks.com.

(I messed up the Shakespeare quote because I couldn't read my own handwriting. The correct quote is, "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages." It's from As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII.)

Key words: sociology, impression management, dramaturgy.

This video helps you succeed at persuasion by teaching you how to pick the best message from as set of alternatives.

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Here's a link to the paper discussed in the video: https://academic.oup.com/joc/article/68/1/120/4858532

Persuasion is the key to success in business and personal affairs. In business, you have to get your customers to buy your product or to take some other action. Often, at the start, you create multiple multiple messages, and then you try to decide which one to use in your advertising or marketing campaign.

But how do you choose?

The most typical way is to bring together a group of people who represent your target audience, and then ask their opinions about what works best.

But recent research shows that this is the WRONG APPROACH.

In the video, I'll explain why, and I'll tell you what the right way is test messages for persuasive effectiveness.

This video describes how to recover from chronic illness by re-aligning body, self, and story.

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In this video I teach you how to improve your communication skill and be more articulate by memorizing stock phrases for the common situations you face.

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It is often hard to know the right thing to say, especially in the moment when it counts the most.

We can memorize rules about social interaction, but rules don't tell us what to say.

Communication skill is not about learning abstract rules or strategies---it's about having the actual words come to mind so we can say them instead of standing there grasping for words.

And the only way I know how to do that is to fill my mind with good words by reading poems, speeches, books, plays, lyrics, and articles by all the great communicators who have come before me or are alive now.

When someone says something well, I take note of it, either mentally or by making an actual note in my phone or notebook.

Then I try to make that exact phrase my own. Over a lifetime, you develop a catalog of phrases that you can reuse with only slight variation.

Every type of situation has its own idiom, its own particular set of stock phrases.

Learning to me a good communicator is often just a process of learning the idiom for whatever situation concerns you most.

This is not shallow or superficial, the act of memorizing phrases and re-using them.

It's how all communication works.

It's why gmail can have a phrase completion algorithm that works extremely well most of the time. Because most of our language use is drawn from a phrasal lexicon.

Because almost none of what we say, especially in ordinary, face-to-face interaction, is all that original.